Google Now Giving Developers More Ways for their Apps To Write to Google Drive

Google launched a couple new features for Google Drive. But only developers will really benefit from them. They have added a new feature called “app data folders” which is where a developer can store important files in a user’s Drive storage space. Now this is pretty big news because up until now, the only method for backing up data was to use the Backup API. Which is okay for small files that are around 1-2MB in size. But for larger files, it’s a bit more difficult. Like using Carbon to backup your phone.

This doesn’t mean that developers will be storing a bunch of data in your Drive account. You’ll still be able to see how much data is being stored, but you won’t be able to see whats in there. Developers can now tell their app how to retrieve data Potentially this could be used to save game data and retrieve it on a new device.

Google is also giving developers the ability to add custom properties to any file in Google Drive. This is going to allow apps to apply arbitrary metadata and utilize is for the apps own functions.

Both of these features are rather small but the are still a big deal for developers. Especially those that have support for backing up to Google Drive. But we know developers will find plenty of uses for these new features. I’d expect Carbon Backup & App Sync to have an update pretty soon since it supports Google Drive, along with Titanium Backup and a few other backup apps out there.

How many of you use apps that store data in Google Drive? I use Carbon, which stores quite a bit on Google Drive for me, so I’m excited to see what changes I’ll see on the user side of things.